UNDER-CURRENTS
Spring waxed full, buds burst into flower, then petals dropped and the hard green fruit began to swell, and the blades of the corn showed perceptibly higher every week. Summer, warm and lazy, big with all her ripening store, brooded upon the land, and Phoebe Ruan, guarding the growing life she held, seemed, with all the care taken of her, to lose vigour and gaiety. She seemed to wish to withdraw from everyone, from Ishmael most of all, as though she only wished to sit and commune with the secret soul of the child beneath her heart. She was almost beautiful these days, touched by a gravity new to her, and with an added poise. For the first time it was as though she found sufficient support in her own company and did not need to be for ever following and leaning upon other people. To look at, sitting so withdrawn, her eyes watching something unseen of human gaze, she was perfect; even in intercourse she would have been more nearly so than ever before had it not been for the fits of irritability gave unwonted bitterness to her tongue. There were days when nothing would please her, when she showed all her common strain in the taunts she found to fling at Ishmael and the rest of her little world. Only Archelaus was immune, and in his presence she maintained a sullen silence, so marked that a third person with them could, if he were sensitive, feel her ever-deepening resentment emanating from her.
Archelaus himself was as though unaware of it, for he came to the house with increasing frequency. About this time he began to walk out with a Botallack girl, the daughter of a mine captain, and indeed asked Ishmael's congratulations on the match. But, in his brotherly fashion, he was always eager to do anything to help Phoebe, whether it were to ride into Penzance and buy her anything she wished for, or to wait on her at home, adjusting a hammock at exactly the right height and carrying out cushions. Only Phoebe knew the taunt that underlay every word, the subtle scheme for making her uncomfortable that he carried on under cover of his solicitude. And she was not clever enough to combat it; when he told her she had ruined his life by marrying Ishmael, she was not brave enough to retort that he had had opportunity enough to marry her and never breathed the wish; when she hinted as much, he retorted that he had only been waiting to make more money so that she could have a position worthy of her. He declared that all she had married Ishmael for was to get the position that should by rights have belonged to him, Archelaus. That there had been a month of terror when she would, if he had not already left, have begged him to marry her she never told him. That fear had been groundless and had passed, but she never forgave it him.
Since his return she could not have told what swelled her resentment the more—that he should dare to come back at all, or that his fascination for her, the plainer to her since intimacy with another man had proved so much less wonderful, should prick at her perpetually in spite of her dislike of him. Ishmael she still regarded as a superior being whom she admired, but the touch of Archelaus's casual hand had power over her that was more intensified than stilled both by her resentment and her distrust.
So the months went by, and the time drew nearer, and all seemed more peaceful at Cloom than it had ever been. One day Phoebe happened to be alone; Ishmael and John-James were in the fields, and Phoebe lay on a plush sofa in the parlour. Ishmael had bought that sofa for her in Penzance when she admired its glossy crimson curves. She had not been at all grateful; she had merely told him that he bought it, as he did everything else for which she expressed a wish, because he wanted to do everything possible to ensure a healthy and happy child, and there was enough of truth in her accusation to justify it. Now she lay upon the sofa, staring at the mahogany arm that ran along one side of it and wishing that she were dead or that Archelaus would go away and not torment her with his taunts and his kisses—his whole presence that made her feel so helpless. While she lay there thus thinking he came in, walking straight into the hall as of right, whistling carelessly; and she heard his stick, flung against the wall, go sliding and clattering down upon the stone flags.
The next moment he was in the room and standing looking down at her with a smile. She did not move, but lay looking back at him like a small bird stricken motionless and staring beneath a hawk. Wanda, who was curled up by her feet, growled softly. What strange twist it was in Archelaus, what sardonic cruelty, inherited perhaps from the old Squire, that made him take pleasure in tormenting the helpless Phoebe it would have been hard to say. Though always latent in him, it may have been waked to activity by the wound on his head which had left the scar. Some nice balance may have been overset in his brain, though there was bitterness enough in his sense of grudge to stimulate him to a perpetual nagging at this vulnerable part of Ishmael. He had lately discovered a new way to frighten her; in addition to his passionate urgings of what he called his love, he vowed that he would not be able to bear his life much longer, that in losing Cloom he had been sent out to wander the earth a disappointed man, but in losing her he had lost all that had made his life worth living. He threatened to kill himself, with so many picturesque details and so much grim emphasis, that there were moments when he could almost have deceived himself, let alone poor simple Phoebe. His feeling for her had been of the most animal even at its strongest, but he had to the full the primitive instinct for possession; he had made her his woman, and, though he might have felt a mere blind jealousy if she had married any other man, to find her taken by Ishmael, the younger brother who had dispossessed him of all, awoke in him a surge of anger stronger than any emotion he had ever known.
He stooped down and deliberately took a long kiss from her mouth, hitting the back of his hand against Wanda's sensitive nose to stop her growling. She whimpered and slunk off the sofa, and Archelaus helped her departure with his boot. Phoebe was too taken up with his cruelty to herself to reproach him on behalf of the dog.
"You ought to be ashamed, Archelaus!" she complained. "Oh, sometimes I think you're the wickedest man in the world, that I do…!"
"Who's made me so, then? Who went and wed another man as soon as I'd gone off to make a fortune for her, eh? Tell me that!"
"I don't believe it; if it had been that you'd have told me."